Paul Newman: A Life, by Shawn Levy - Excerpt

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PAUL NEWMAN
A Life
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Also by Shawn Levy
The Last Playboy: The High Life of Porfirio Rubirosa
Rat Pack Confidential: Frank, Dean, Sammy, Peter, Joey &

the Last Great Showbiz Party
Ready, Steady, Go!: The Smashing Rise and

Giddy Fall of Swinging London
King of Comedy: The Life and Art of Jerry Lewis

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PAUL NEWMAN
A Life
SHAWN LEVY
Harmony Books New York
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Copyright © 2009 by Shawn Levy
All rights reserved.

Published in the United States by Harmony Books, an imprint of the
Crown Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
www.crownpublishing.com
Harmony Books is a registered trademark and the Harmony Books

colophon is a trademark of Random House, Inc.
Title page photo credit: © Bettmann/Corbis

Part title photo credits: Parts One and Three are courtesy of Photofest; Part
Two is courtesy of Special Collections, Cleveland State University Library;
Parts Four, Five, and Six are from the author’s collection.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Levy, Shawn.
Paul Newman: a life/Shawn Levy.
p. cm.
1. Newman, Paul, 1925–2008. 2. Motion picture actors and
actresses—United States—Biography. I. Title.
PN2287.N44L48 2009
791.4302'8092—dc22
[B] 2009011220
ISBN 978-0-307-35375-7
Printed in the United States of America
Design by Lauren Dong
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
First Edition
www.HarmonyBooks.com
To purchase a copy of
Paul Newman: A Life
visit one of these online retailers:

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Part One
merica doesn’t have a national epic, but Our Town might
A do in a pinch. The cracker-barrel homilies; the good-natured

ironies; the snapshots of bygone ways; the razor-sharp observa-
tions couched in polite language; the hints of pain; the hesitance toward
joy; the sneaky surges of emotion; the climax that brings a welling to
your eyes despite yourself. It contains us, Thornton Wilder’s chestnut.
That’s why it can sometimes feel that if you’ve seen one production
of it, you’ve seen ’em all.
Or maybe not.
Take this one—in particular, take the male leads.
The Stage Manager is a hawkish fellow: slender, purposeful, know-
ing, vigilant. He dresses for comfort and doesn’t care if his collar is
straight or if his tie is askew. Disheveled, with his spectacles perched
on the tip of his nose and a vaguely distracted air, he’s still rakishly
handsome; clearly he was a corker in his time. He appears to have lived
every vicissitude of life, and while experience hasn’t entirely softened
him, it has provided him a store of indulgence to mete out, judiciously
but amiably, as he sees fit. There’s no doubt that he can size a body up
in a few piercing measures, and there’s no doubt, either, that his arith-
metic is sure. But such is his air of decency and authority that you find
yourself hoping he deems you worthy.
George Gibbs, the youthful hero, is another matter: an all-American
boy with muscles in his shoulders and, you can’t help but suspect, in
his head. His heart is in the right place, heaven knows, even if he must
4 Shawn Levy
occasionally be reminded of just where that place is. He’s a handsome

thing, and enthusiasms burble out of him infectiously. His gaze is
open, and his springy mien belies a real zest for life. But when he takes
the time to notice smaller things or surprises himself by stumbling
upon a sincere emotion, he turns puppyish. He even, caught up in the
swell of love, croons; you wouldn’t tune a piano to it, but it’s sincere.
Their interactions are brief but memorable. At one moment the
Stage Manager assumes the aspect of a biddy and lashes out at poor,
dim George for tossing a ball to himself in the middle of the road.
“You got no business playing baseball on Main Street,” he cackles in an
old lady’s voice, cowing the boy, and you reckon he’s getting a kick out
of his charade as the lad dutifully scampers off.
Later, when George escorts his sweetheart, Emily, to the drugstore
for an ice cream soda, the Stage Manager takes on the persona of
Mr. Morgan, proprietor and counterman. Precisely and warmly, he
crafts the fountain treats for the youngsters, and when it turns out that
George has forgotten his pocket money at home, he refuses to accept
the boy’s gold watch as collateral for the debt: “I’ll trust you ten years,
George—not a day over.”
You sense affection in the older man and, equally, respect in the
younger; the mutuality is warming. And as is so often the case, the
warmth arises not only from the material but from the actors them-
selves—a real coup of casting, in fact.
The old man has acted for Leo McCarey, who directed the Marx
Brothers, and Michael Curtiz, who made Casablanca, and he appeared
many times on live television during that medium’s golden age. The
kid has worked with the Coen Brothers and Martin Scorsese and Sam
Mendes and lent his voice to a big-budget Pixar movie and the video
game version of it.
The old man is world famous: you can’t go to the supermarket, the
video store, or the Indianapolis Motor Speedway without encounter-
ing his image or his legacy. You think of Henry Fonda, Humphrey
Bogart, and James Stewart as his equals. The kid is making a big name
for himself, but he keeps getting compared to other actors, often as a
way of dismissing him or counting him short: Marlon Brando, most
often, and James Dean.
PA U L N E W M A N 5
One has just turned thirty, has been married for six years, and has
three children, the oldest not quite five. The other is seventy-eight,
with his forty-fifth anniversary coming up and five grown daughters
and a pair of grandkids with whom to celebrate it.
Physically, they share some traits: wavy hair, icy blue eyes, a classi-
cal handsomeness that looks patrician on the old fellow and preppy on
the kid, and a springy grace that makes the young man seem coltish
and the old man seem spry.
But their personalities are pretty distinct. The old guy is serious, a
World War II vet who attended Kenyon College and the Yale School
of Drama on the GI Bill and dreamed of becoming a teacher and takes
an active part in politics; he’s raised hundreds of millions of dollars for
charity and served as president of the Actors Studio. The young guy is
famous for his beer drinking and his practical jokes and his goofball
sense of humor and his love of fast cars and motorcycles and his roles
as antiauthoritarian rebels; he’s already created a couple of parts on
Broadway that have maintained a place in the national repertoire and
made a few indelible TV dramas.
The older man you know: Paul Newman, playing the Stage Man-
ager in the Westport County Playhouse production of Our Town as
filmed at the Booth Theater on Broadway in early 2003.
And the younger man, well, you know him too: Paul Newman,
playing George Gibbs in the same play, adapted as a musical for NBC
television’s Producers’ Showcase in September 1955.
Between those two performances sits an entire career and, indeed,
an entire life—not only of one man but of the culture in which he
thrived.
The blind, impetuous vigor of youth; the wry, still acceptance of ma-
turity; the progress of an artist in his craft; the maturation of a soul, a
mind, a body; the life of a man and the half-century of history he lived
and echoed and symbolized and even shaped: Paul Newman’s story is
all of it.
From a burgeoning Jazz Age suburb to a torpedo bomber in the
Pacific, from the womb of academia to the free-for-all of Broadway
6 Shawn Levy
and live TV, from the gilded cage of a Hollywood studio contract to
the wild freedom of directing films for his own production company,
from the filth and noise and danger of professional auto racing to the
staid and venerable confines of the Philanthropy Hall of Fame, Paul
Newman’s life is a blazon of the American century, incorporating the
very best national traits in a compact and comely package.
For fifty years, on-screen and off, Newman vividly embodied cer-
tain tendencies in the American male character: active and roguish and
earnest and sly and determined and vulnerable and brave and humble
and reliable and compassionate and fair. He was a man of his time, and
that time ranged from World War II to the contemporary era of digi-
tally animated feature films. He was equally at home on Hollywood
soundstages, in theatrical workshops, in the pits of racetracks, and es-
pecially on the blessedly raucous fields and in the log cabins and swim-
ming holes of the camps he built and maintained for seriously ill
children. The world was his for the claiming—and he claimed only
the bit that he felt was reasonably due him, and he gave back more, by
far, than he ever took.
He was ridiculously handsome and trim, with a face that belonged
on an ancient coin, eyes that stunned and dazed even cynics, and an
athlete’s compact, lithe, and peppy body. Having fallen into acting as a
profession, he would have been guaranteed at least minimal success by
sheer virtue of his physical charms. If he’d had no talent or tenacity or
intellect or drive, he might still have enjoyed fame and riches. Put him
in a dinner jacket, and he could sit confidently at table with presidents
or poets or kings. He looked the part—in fact, he looked any part, vir-
tually, that he was asked to play.
But he was smart and cagey and suspicious of fortune too easily
won, and he was scrupulous in distinguishing the things that came to
him through luck from those he felt he’d earned. He opted to live as
far as reasonable from Hollywood, preferred barn coats and blue jeans
to tuxedos, and chose the company of troupers and mechanics and
beer-swillers over that of celebrities and swells and hobnobbers every
time. There was crust and vinegar to him, and he relished the oppor-
tunity that his position in life afforded him to startle big shots with his
sometimes downmarket tastes and preferences. And vice versa: he
loved to sprinkle unexpected stardust in the humblest of contexts, just

when he was taken for an ordinary joe.
He was, as he always insisted, a private man whose profession gave
him a public face. And he grappled with the incongruity of that for a
long time. If he was a cautious and shy fellow raised to a painfully pu-
ritanical ethos, he would learn to espouse his inner wildness by adapt-
ing personae—in life and in art—that camouflaged his insecurity and
reticence in the cloth of exuberance and levity. If he was treated as a
freak because of the inescapable fact that he was born beautiful, he
would learn to turn that beauty into a tool of subterfuge, creating
characters whose allure hid complex and painful depths. If his looks
would make him a star, he would redirect that stardom into a benefit
for others, slapping his face on labels for food products and creating
staggering wealth—then giving all the money away. If he was, regard-
less of his age, a sex symbol, he would work hard at being a good hus-
band and father. If his personal wealth meant that he could take up
motor sports at a high level, he would work as tenaciously at racing as
he did at acting and earn acceptance in that world through sheer appli-
cation and diligently acquired skill. If things came easily to him, he de-
termined to share the benefit he accrued.
Few have lived fuller or richer lives than Paul Newman, and at the
time of his death, the world seemed to take stock for the first time of
all the Paul Newmans it had known: the actor, the driver, the public
citizen, the entrepreneur, the philanthropist, the family man. But as
Newman always knew, it all began with luck—the genetics, upbring-
ing, education, and career fortunes that uniquely enabled him to be-
come a movie star. And it was as a movie star that he made his most
obvious mark on the world.
In ways, he did it through the back door. Rarely appearing in obvi-
ous blockbusters, striving to reinvent himself by shedding his skin
every few years, he compiled a cinematic résumé over five decades that
was studded regularly with milestone films and performances: Some-
body Up There Likes Me; The Long, Hot Summer; The Left Handed Gun;
Cat on a Hot Tin Roof; Exodus; The Hustler; Paris Blues; Hud; Harper;
8 Shawn Levy
Hombre; Cool Hand Luke; Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid; The Life
and Times of Judge Roy Bean; The Sting; The Towering Inferno; Buffalo
Bill and the Indians; Slap Shot; Fort Apache the Bronx; Absence of Malice;
The Verdict; The Color of Money; Blaze; Mr. & Mrs. Bridge; The Hud-
sucker Proxy; Nobody’s Fool; Road to Perdition; Empire Falls; Cars. This is
more than just a litany of estimable (and in some cases commercially
gigantic) film titles. It’s the trajectory of an actor determined to squirm
away from preconceptions and to sharpen his artistic abilities at the
same time. It stands against the very few similar lists of films ever com-
piled, and it spans eras, styles, generations. He wasn’t the greatest
American actor, and he was not even the greatest actor of his own vin-
tage. But he was arguably the most American actor, the fellow whose
roles and accumulated persona best captured the tenor of his times and
his people.
Newman arrived in movies with the Method actor invaders of the
1950s and rode out their splashy heyday, becoming a commercial
superstar while insistently pushing forward the boundaries of his craft.
If you approached him initially only at the superficial level—the level
of beauty, as it were—you might have mistaken him for Rock Hudson
or Tony Curtis or Robert Wagner, handsome and capable, sure, but
movie stars principally rather than craftsmen. Newman, though, had
an internal discipline that demanded he make more of himself, and he
earned, through sheer perseverance, a place alongside—and in ways,
above—the Method gods Marlon Brando, Montgomery Clift, and
James Dean. He was ultimately the one true superstar to emerge from
the original Actors Studio generation, the most popular and enduring
Stanislavskyan actor in American screen history, the only one who
could sit comfortably alongside big-time Golden Era movie stars and
newfangled subversive interlopers.
And he was able to bridge the space between those two brands of
actors for decades. In a half-century of movies, the characteristic New-
man role morphed from almost-too-pretty to dangerously sleek to de-
liberately wily to weathered and weary-wise. At his best he played
against his looks—which may be why he is widely regarded as improv-
ing as an actor as he aged. And his instinct to cut against himself meant
that he couldn’t personify scions of wealth and privilege as well as he
could ordinary men struggling with quotidian issues—particularly the

struggles of fathers and sons who couldn’t communicate adequately or,
indeed, love each other enough. Even though he was a partner in a
famed half-century marriage, he rarely played a romantic lead and,
truly, never all that well. Rather, he played broken athletes, half-crazed
outlaws, cocky scam artists, insouciant iconoclasts, and a long skein
of rascally and unreliable private eyes, liquor salesmen, cops, spies,
lawyers, loggers, and construction workers. Very occasionally—and
perhaps only to satisfy a seemingly visceral need to avoid repeating
himself—he played men of ramrod morality and authority whose posi-
tions as social leaders belied their failures as human beings; pre-
dictably, as with so many other types he essayed, he nailed them.
Taken as a whole, Newman’s body of work nicely encapsulated the
history of an in-between generation of American men who helped their
fathers and uncles conquer the world in war and commerce but who
could only watch—likely with some jealousy—as their younger sib-
lings and their own children acted out on the native rebellious impulse
to overturn everything. He fit in precisely with neither the Greatest
Generation nor the Baby Boomers but represented instead a vital link
in the American century—a band of men who were meant to inherit a
system that was no longer reliably in place by the time their fathers
willed it to them. Torn by the conflicting impulses to rule and rebel, his
was arguably the pivotal generation of the twentieth century, and New-
man, almost unconsciously, was its actor laureate.
Newman was proud of his profession, eternally grateful to his teach-

ers and peers and colleagues and to the writers and directors who cre-
ated the roles and the projects he appeared in. But like other men’s
men who take up acting, he could find himself embarrassed by the
fussiness of his craft, and he had a need to assert himself in other, more
physical areas of life in order to pass muster with himself. And so auto
racing, as alien a pastime to the arts as could be imagined, became a
second world for him. Picking it up in his mid-forties, he was seen at
first as a dilettante. But his bulldog tenacity (and, too, his native ath-
leticisim and his uncommon financial means) took him to remarkable
10 Shawn Levy
levels of accomplishment: four national amateur titles, two profes-

sional race victories, a second-place finish at the famed twenty-four-
hour race in Le Mans, and, at age seventy, a victory in his team’s class
in the 24 Hours of Daytona—making him the oldest person to win a
sanctioned auto race ever, anywhere. As a team owner in even higher
classes of competition, his success was greater still: 8 national titles and
107 individual race victories—a massive haul.
And he was nearly as accomplished an entrepreneur as he was a
race-car driver and owner. As a purveyor of food products, a business
that he didn’t enter until his mid-fifties, he created new standards for
the elimination of preservatives and the use of fresh ingredients in
salad dressings, spaghetti sauces, salsas, and snack foods. And when he
expanded into organic foods, his became one of the nation’s most rec-
ognized and trusted brands. Those businesses led to another area of
achievement: philanthropy. Aside from the millions of dollars and
thousands of hours he donated privately over the years, his Newman’s
Own Foundation, which gave away all posttax profits from the food
businesses, doled out more than $250 million in its first twenty-five
years of existence. And in the final years before his death, Newman be-
queathed his share of the company—valued at nearly $120 million—
for similar distribution.
It’s a staggering list of achievements—the acting, the racing, the earn-

ings, the giving away—and he could sometimes seem uneasy about it
all and, especially, about the image that the rest of the world had of
him as a result. The great sportswriter Jim Murray, who met him on a
racetrack, opined, “He’s probably the only guy in America who doesn’t
want to be Paul Newman.” And William Goldman, who wrote Harper
and Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, remarked similarly, “I don’t
think Paul Newman really thinks he is Paul Newman in his head.”
In rare unguarded moments, he admitted as much. “The toughest
role is playing Paul Newman,” he told a reporter. “My own personal-
ity is so vapid and bland, I have to go steal the personalities of other
people to be effective.”
He wasn’t blowing smoke. He was a man of great gifts, but he was
genuinely humble, believing in work and family and luck and commu-
nity and the greater good—and if a surfeit of that good slopped up
onto his plate over the years, he would be sure to share it, and he
would do so in the best humor he could. Somehow he had turned the
gifts life and luck had granted him into things he could multiply and
give back. Occasionally along the way he would misstep or be discour-
teous or make a wrong aesthetic choice or drive ill-advisedly or what-
not, but what he never did was hole up, retreat, give in, surrender, or
fail to engage.
“What I would really like to put on my tombstone,” he once said,
“is that I was part of my time.”
And he was.
Part Two
One
haker Heights was a dream within a dream, part Gar-
S den of Eden, part Camelot, part World of Tomorrow.

It had lawns and trees and winding roads and handsome homes
and golf courses and some of the nation’s best schools and rapid tran-
sit into the heart of a major city. Its parks were slices of raw wilderness
left unspoiled and right at hand to enjoy. Its commercial heart, Shaker
Square, was a modern, well-appointed shopping district built to recall
a New England village green. The town was among the crests of that
great energetic wave of American expansion known as the Roaring
Twenties. A man who brought his family to live there could count
himself a true success. And children born there could count them-
selves truly lucky.
Or so it would seem.
“Shaker Heights was a cloister,” said Paul Newman, who grew up
there from the age of two.
It happens that he was a restless sort. But it also happens to be an
apt description: the town had, in fact, been built on hallowed ground.
Shaker Heights stood about ten miles from Public Square, the tra-
ditional heart of Cleveland, Ohio. Originally known as North Union,
the area had first been settled in the 1820s by a colony of Shakers, one
of those Protestant sects that thrived in young America and that took
its name from the physically vigorous style of prayer practiced by its
adherents. They called their new home “the Valley of God’s Pleasure,”
but it didn’t please God for them to thrive there for long: Shakers are,
16 Shawn Levy
by doctrine, celibate, increasing their numbers only through adoption

and conversion; by 1889 a lack of newcomers meant that the once-
thriving community of hundreds had dwindled to twenty-nine aging
folks who could no longer maintain their homes or work their land.
They sold their bit of heaven—1,366 acres, including mills and other
buildings—to a consortium of Cleveland investors for $316,000. The
land was platted and renamed Shaker Heights, but it lay undeveloped
for more than a decade. In 1905 Mantis and Oris Van Sweringen, a
truly eccentric pair of Cleveland developers, acquired and built on a
few of the unused lots, creating a small village. Within two years the
brothers had arranged for a streetcar line to come out to their parcels,
acquired the rest of the undeveloped land, and unveiled their scheme
for the town.
What they had in mind was an exacting utopian plan, an idyll far
enough from the center of Cleveland to be free of smoke and noise
and tumult but sufficiently close that commuting would be but a com-
fortable morning’s and evening’s ride. They imagined a genteel garden
of a suburb governed by strict housing codes and covenants, a paradise
for prosperous families built along the English bourgeois ideal of the
village.
Anyone from Cleveland could appreciate the desire for such a re-
treat. The city from which Shaker Heights residents would be migrat-
ing was one of the chief cauldrons of the American industrial epoch,
young and brawny and composed of equal parts New England propri-
ety, frontier rascality, and immigrant vitality. And it was constantly
growing: a century earlier it had been a wilderness outpost with a pop-
ulation of literally one, and by the end of the First World War it was a
crucial hub of oil refining, iron and steel manufacturing, retail com-
merce, and transit—the sixth largest city in the United States.
As a city, Cleveland was a stripling: grimy, raucous, and rude, its
Lake Erie waterfront choked with shipping traffic, its Cuyahoga River
slow and fetid, its railyards and factories belching smoke and bleeding
noise, its inner core a patchwork of immigrant neighborhoods teem-
ing with imported sights, sounds, and smells. There was always a por-
tion of the city dedicated to civic enrichment, organization, culture,
the finer things; it had gentility. But it was far more impressed with its
industry than with its soul. Anyone with a head to make a business for
himself could create wonders in such a freewheeling environment;
local boy John D. Rockefeller had already risen from dubious roots to
become a metaphor for unimaginable wealth created out of thin air.
But anyone with a head to make a life for himself would seek more
easeful and commodious surroundings. And on the anticipation of ful-
filling that urge the Van Sweringens’ plan was realized.
By 1920, when the Shaker Heights Rapid Transit line was inaugu-
rated to speed riders to and from Cleveland, Shaker Heights had more
than 1,600 residents; ten years later, it had swelled to more than
17,000, all living in single-family homes, none of which, per the Van
Sweringens’ plan, were exactly alike. Among the newcomers were
Arthur S. Newman and his wife, Theresa, who invested in the dream
of Shaker Heights in 1927, moving with their two sons, three-year-old
Arthur and two-year-old Paul, into a big but not ostentatious $35,000
house at 2983 Brighton Road.
That was a lot of money for the time—nearly a half-million dollars
in contemporary terms—but it was a remarkably flush moment for the
national economy, and Art, as he was commonly known, wouldn’t have
spent it if he couldn’t afford it. As secretary and treasurer of Newman-
Stern, Cleveland’s largest and best-liked sporting goods and consumer
electronics store, he was a man who had created out of whole cloth a
business built on a nation’s increased devotion to entertainment and
leisure time. The 1920s were a golden age of sports heroes—Babe Ruth,
Red Grange, Bobby Jones, Bill Tilden, Jack Dempsey—and Newman-
Stern could sell you not only all the gear and accoutrements that you’d
require to emulate those greats but also a radio on which to listen to ac-
counts of their achievements. As long as Clevelanders had money in
their pockets and free time in which to spend it, the sporting goods and
electronics business was sure to thrive.
So why not buy a nicer home? Previously the Newmans had lived in
Cleveland Heights at 2100 Renrock Road, a small, trim, undistin-
guished single-family dwelling in a neighborhood close by a pair of busy
streets—not the nicest part of Cleveland Heights but conveniently near
18 Shawn Levy
the home of Arthur’s older brother Joseph, who also happened to be his
business partner and, probably, best friend in the world.
Brighton Road was an obvious step up. An English Tudor house
with a peaked roof, it was a pleasant stroll away from Shaker Boule-
vard, the town’s main artery, and it was set back from the curling street
on which it stood by two rectangles of lawn and a handful of oak and
maple trees. A fireplace dominated the front room, and big windows
looked out over the front and back yards. There were more imposing
homes on the street—indeed, there were outright mansions nearby.
But the Newmans’ home would certainly satisfy anyone’s idea of com-
fort, modest luxury, and good taste.
For Arthur and Theresa, the house was a physical realization of the
dreams of all those immigrants who had left Europe for America and a
chance to make something of themselves. Arthur’s parents were both
born in the old country, as was Theresa herself. Their ability to rise
from those roots to the prosperity of Shaker Heights was an instance
of what many would call the American dream, and it was also a crucial
element in what would become the character of their younger son.
Cleveland was a city of three genetic threads: the New England

gentility of its founders, who hailed from Connecticut and tried to
build a city according to their sense of propriety; the frontier wildness
of its first inhabitants, who were drawn to a settlement on the edge of
civilization, where the laws of nature and the frontier trumped those of
governments; and the immigrant waves who filled and fueled the fac-
tories that came to define the city when industrialization supersized it
from a town to a metropolis. In 1800 the hamlet had a single resident;
eighty years later there were more than 260,000 Clevelanders, at least
a third of whom were foreign-born.
Those immigrants are a crucial part of the city’s story. They came
from all the predictable places: England and Ireland and Germany at
first, then Italy, Poland, Austria, Hungary, Bohemia, Russia, the Slavic
states, Greece. They brought with them languages, customs, foods, so-
cial modes, and ways of worship never before seen in the region. Before
1836, for instance, there is no record of a Jewish resident in the place
named for a man called Moses Cleaveland. By 1850, though, there

were enough Jews in the city for them to have a theological falling-
out: a pair of rival synagogues existed in an uneasy truce. By 1880
more than three thousand Jews were living in the booming city, mostly
German, with more on the way from farther east.
Among that small but highly visible group of Jewish immigrants
were Simon Newman, who had been born in 1853 in Hungary, and
Hannah Cohn, who was born four years later in what was variously de-
scribed as Hungary and Poland in legal documents throughout her
life. Simon had arrived in the United States as a young, footloose man
and found work as a dry goods peddler. Hannah had emigrated as a
seventeen-year-old in 1870, along with her parents and some older
siblings who moved on to settle in Arkansas.
Hannah and Simon were married in Cleveland on October 10,
1876, and they started a family almost immediately. In the 1880 census
the Newmans listed two girls in their household: Minnie, not quite
two, and an infant, Lillian. At nearly regular intervals they added to the
family: a son, Aaron, born in 1881, followed by another pair of girls,
Ottile (1884) and Gertrude (1886). By then Simon had graduated from
peddler to manufacturer-merchant, with his own hat-making workshop
and store, Newman’s Millinery. Perhaps that accounts for the pause in
births in the family. It wasn’t until 1891 that Joseph, the second son,
was born, followed by the last of the bunch, Arthur, in 1893.
The Newmans lived in the Jewish neighborhoods of Cleveland that
resembled the Jewish enclaves of other big American cities, with push-
carts and small family businesses and tenements pouring out old-world
noises and aromas—cauldrons from which bright young men and
women strove toward integration into American society through edu-
cation and entry into social and cultural institutions. As in New York
and Chicago, the Cleveland Jews established themselves relatively rap-
idly in professional, academic, and public pursuits throughout the city.
They may even have made a quicker ascent there than in other places
because of the youth of the city and its lightning rise and its sprawl.
Consider the Newmans. There were grander birthrights, even
among recent immigrant families, than the Newmans’ tiny family hat-
making business. But Hannah and Simon were raising a remarkably
20 Shawn Levy
creative and successful group of offspring. Their hat shop, for in-
stance, would one day be immortalized in 1943 in Polly Poppingay,
Milliner, a popular chapter book for children written by Gertrude
Newman, who by then had already published another children’s book,
The Story of Delicia, a Rag Doll. Lillian, too, was a writer, producing
verse in Yiddish. Ottile would become a schoolteacher and go on to
head the drama group at the Euclid Avenue Temple, probably the
most prominent synagogue in Cleveland; one of her sons, Richard
Newman Campen, would graduate from Dartmouth College and
forge a career as a noted historian of midwestern art and architecture.
The Newman boys were also to make marks on the world. Aaron
attended some college and then became a reporter for the Cleveland
World and, in 1906, the cofounder and business manager of the Jewish
Independent, one of several Jewish papers in town. In 1927, that incred-
ibly flush year, he inaugurated two enterprises: the Little Theater of
the Movies, the first cinema in Cleveland devoted exclusively to for-
eign films, and the Cleveland Sportsman’s and Outdoors Show, a trade
fair at which manufacturers and retailers exhibited the latest recre-
ational gear. During the Depression he wrote several satirical pam-
phlets about the fear of Communist strains in the New Deal.*
Quite a character. And yet his brother Joseph made even more of a
splash in the world. No history of twentieth-century Cleveland is truly
complete without mentioning, at least in passing, the ingenious, loqua-
cious, mercurial, professorial, practical, affable, quixotic sprite born
Joseph Simon Newman. Poet, inventor, orator, journalist, gadabout,
boulevardier, and mensch, Joe Newman published science columns and
light verse in newspapers, held patents on electronic communications
gizmos, wrote the annual musical comedy revue for the City Club for
more than three decades, taught at Cleveland College, served as a
* And he produced an accomplished son in William S. Newman, a classical pianist and

music scholar who taught at the University of North Carolina for more than thirty
years. (A concert series there still bears his name.) His three-volume History of the
Sonata, first published in 1963, is considered a landmark, and he was also something of
an eccentric, once crossing the United States on a motorcycle in a barnstorming con-
cert tour.
trustee of the Cleveland Play House, published four books of poetry,

and built with his kid brother, Arthur, the most successful sporting and
recreational goods store between Chicago and New York.
Joe was always good with both words and numbers. After high
school he spent a year at college and then worked for six months in an
electrical lab. Then he went into retail, working for the big Stearn and
Co. department store in the electrical, camera, and mechanical toy de-
partments. All the while he fussed with electrical equipment and with
words. Under the name Dr. Si. N. Tiffic, he wrote a kids’ science col-
umn for the Plain Dealer, as well as a stream of light verse on public is-
sues of the day. And he invented things—small radio and telegraph
components, remote-controlled switches for toys and lights, a tele-
phone system for children—some of which he took out patents for.
By 1913 he was married to the daughter of Maurice Weidenthal,
who had cofounded the Jewish Independent with Aaron Newman. The
following year he was on his own in business, using $500 to establish
the Electro-Set Company, which built and sold lines of radio gear,
telegraph equipment, electrical experiment kits, telescopes, and micro-
scopes. The business took off, especially with kids, and moved from
what was essentially a warehouse to a proper retail space. Joe had all
kinds of schemes to grow the trade, such as a daily telegraph message
to all customers to announce sales or new equipment: e-commerce in
1915! And because he knew his way around the insides of the equip-
ment he sold, the shop became Cleveland’s first supplier of radio parts;
soon it was involved in a thriving national mail-order enterprise.
Unfortunately, World War I put an end to the sale of wireless equip-
ment to civilians, and Electro-Set was suddenly deprived of a large part
of its business. In 1917 it morphed, changing its name to Newman-
Stern and mixing in sporting goods with the remaining lines of scien-
tific and electrical equipment. Joe would serve as president of the
company, and he had two partners: Arnold L. Stern, who was strictly an
investor, and as secretary and treasurer his own younger brother, Art, a
bachelor and failed journalist then twenty-three years old.
-
22 Shawn Levy
Arthur Sigmund Newman was born on August 29, 1893, and soon
afterward the family was altered forever; by the time of his second
birthday, his father had died. Art, as he was always known, would be
raised by his sisters and brothers, all still living at home as late as 1900.
Hannah ran Newman’s Millinery in the bustling Jewish commercial
district on Cleveland’s West Twenty-sixth Street. Like Joe, who was
only two years older, Art attended Central High School; like Aaron, he
was drawn into newspaper work. Not long after high school he
founded, published, wrote, and solicited ads for a local business circu-
lar, the Home Advertiser. He parlayed that into a job in the advertising
and news departments of the Cleveland Press, where he proved unlucky:
in 1915, phoning into the newsroom to report a scoop regarding a
contentious strike at the Mechanical Rubber Company, he was inad-
vertently connected to the rival Cleveland News, which published his
story while his own paper got nothing; they canned him.
And so Art went straight to work at Electro-Set, finding in Joe not
only a surrogate parent (Hannah had died in 1913 when Art was seven-
teen) but a perfectly complementary partner as well. A few years
later, interviewed in a Cleveland business journal, Joe said: “Art and I
are as alike as sunup and sundown. I am the maniac of the business—
the long-haired dreamer. At least that’s Art’s diagnosis. He is the
hard-shelled, brass-tacks man. Every business needs both types. One
counteracts the other.” The brothers would work together side by
side for decades: Joe a wise and wacky jester filled with unpredictable
energies, Art balding and sad-eyed and diligent and upright and
exact. (Even in his twenties he looked older than his older brother.)
The Newman-Stern Company they built would break all sorts of
new ground: it was the first entity in Cleveland to broadcast election
results by radio and the first to offer steel fishing rods and steel-shafted
golf clubs; its sale of microscopes for children virtually invented the
field. In 1921 the business relocated to a large downtown storefront,
where it would expand again after just seven years and then again after
World War II, by which time it had become the premier destination in
the region for sporting equipment: baseball, camping and fishing gear,
skis, small boats, tents, as well as radios, even television sets. And it al-
ways had a hand in gizmos: in 1946 Art stumbled upon a sweet deal on
army surplus bombsight parts and gyroscopes and did a rampaging

business liquidating it.*
In all that time the brothers remained extremely close. Joe Newman
filed away his personal correspondence for decades, including letters
written by Art while Joe was off on business trips or family vacations
with his wife and two sons. Dutifully, Art would tell him which ship-
ments had arrived, which sales items were moving or not, what the next
round of advertising would promote, and other mundane matters.
There was fluency and energy in Art’s prose but rarely anything very
personal or revelatory. On the odd occasion when Art would encounter
Joe’s family during the latter’s absence, he would note it, but never sen-
timentally. In comparison, Joe’s letters to his brother, some of which he
kept carbon copies of, were filled with levity—he would often insist
that Art actually enjoy a vacation and not worry about business while
on holiday—and Joe’s letters back and forth with his wife and sons were
extremely tender, playful, open, and rich. Art was the worker ant, Joe
the butterfly: together they were a natural team.
Before he built this empire, though, Art Newman had to emerge as
his own man. On December 7, 1917, he enlisted in the army reserve
corps; he was called up to active duty three weeks later and lasted in
the service until he was honorably discharged in February 1919. He
never went overseas but rather spent his time with the Quartermaster
Corps in Johnston, Florida, and later in Maryland and Virginia. He at-
tained the rank of corporal and served mainly in motor pools, a dreary
existence that he described in letters to Joe and in accounts of military
life in the Plain Dealer. By 1920 he was back in Cleveland and living on
East Ninetieth Street, the core of one of the city’s old Jewish commu-
nities. And sometime between then and 1925, he got married.
If the marriage of Arthur and Theresa Newman is clouded in a mist

of half-facts, that may be because Theresa Newman herself came from
* A version of this coup is credited to a character in the 1984 film Harry & Son, which
Paul Newman cowrote and directed.
24 Shawn Levy
a more imprecisely chronicled background than did her husband. She

was of either Hungarian or Bohemian stock and seems to have been
born overseas sometime in the 1890s or maybe even earlier. She came
to America at perhaps age four, perhaps in 1901. In one of the earliest
official documents associated with her life—the birth certificate of her
second son—she claimed to have been born in 1897 in Homona, Aus-
tria, citing the Hungarian name for the modern-day Slovakian town of
Humenne. But that was only one version of her story.
How she arrived in America and with whom is a mystery. Her fa-
ther bore the Christian name Stephen, but in legal documents over the
years his surname was variously rendered as Fetzer (which Theresa
and her sons used most commonly), Fetsko (favored by most of
Theresa’s siblings), Fetzko, Felsko, and, once, Fecke. Stephen was born
in 1854 or 1855; by one account, he arrived in America in 1890 at the
port of Philadelphia; by another, he came through New York in 1889.
(Both dates, crucially, predate Theresa’s year of birth, as she identified
it.) On August 11, 1902, he married Mary Polinak (or Polenak), who
was born in either Hungary or Bohemia and was about twenty years
his junior. Together they raised seven children; in Stephen’s 1946 obit-
uary, they were listed as “Theresa Newman, Mae Eskowsi, Jewell and
Andrew, Steve Polenak, Anna Kurma and Michael (deceased).”
Over the years Stephen worked at various manual trades: laborer,
shipbuilder, bricklayer. When her house was empty, Mary took work
in a mill. Their contradictory, inconsistent, and seemingly hesitant at-
titude toward official record keeping may just be part of the family
heritage as unschooled immigrants who came to America to fuel the
industrial expansion of towns like Cleveland. They had neither the in-
tellectual bent of the Newmans nor that family’s capacity for invention
and self-fulfillment. If the Newmans were archetypical incarnations of
the clever, successful Jewish immigrants who refashioned themselves
in America, the Fetsko-Polenaks were among the imported labor force
that did the thankless, muscular work of the great American industrial
expansion. They stayed out of the papers for all the right reasons and
formed large, hearty families throughout the Midwest that replaced
Eastern Europe as their home.
Stephen and Mary’s blended family moved around every few years,
and they either were overlooked by census takers or got hinky when
they came around: only in 1920 were they fully polled in the national
head count. And Theresa was even more elusive. Indeed, for much of
her early life, surmise is all that’s possible. In 1910 a seventeen-year-old
Theresa Fetzer was working as a domestic at the home of Meyer E.
Loeb of Cleveland. If it was she, it meant that she was a little older than
she later claimed. (Perhaps she and/or the Loebs lied about her age in
order to acquire or legitimize her working situation.) She didn’t appear
in the 1920 census, but she showed up in 1930, by which point the re-
ceived impression of her life story has begun to gel. There she’s a
thirty-two-year-old woman of Czech heritage, naturalized in 1902 and
living in Shaker Heights with her husband, Arthur (described as a shoe
store merchant), and their two boys, Arthur Jr., age six, and Paul, five.
But even then there’s a snag: Arthur, then thirty-six, asserted that he
was married for the first time seven years before, in 1923, at age
twenty-nine; Theresa, though, revealed that she was first married at
age nineteen—thirteen years earlier, in 1917, when she may have been
as old as twenty-four.
Decades later the murkiness of her early life outlived her. Just ask her
son: “My mother, on her deathbed, said, ‘Paul, you have to excuse me,
I’ve been lying all these years. I’m not eighty-three, I’m eighty-seven.’
And when we took her back to Cleveland to be buried next to my father,
her sister was there. And I said, ‘You know, Mother said that she had
been lying all these years, and that she wasn’t eighty-three, she was
eighty-seven.’ And her sister said, ‘Baloney! She was ninety-three!’ ”
The wedding of this rootless, pretty woman and her owlish, respon-
sible husband would also provide a mystery: unique among their par-
ents and siblings, they weren’t issued a marriage license in Cuyahoga
County. Wherever the ceremony was held, it was almost certainly a
civil one. Through his life Art belonged to the synagogue known as
the Temple in the old Woodland Avenue Jewish enclave of west Cleve-
land, but his son Paul remembered, “[He] was not a religious man
in the sense of going to synagogue or thrusting religion down our
throats.” And Theresa would soon leave her native Catholicism for
26 Shawn Levy
Christian Science—the modern American spiritualist belief popular

in the 1920s. She wasn’t so ardent as to deny her sons the benefits of
medical care, as strict Christian Scientists would, and she seemed not
to mind that her boys didn’t follow her faith. “That didn’t really take
on me,” Paul would say of the religion (although he did declare him-
self a Christian Scientist on college applications, probably reckoning
that claiming Jewish heritage would have put him at a disadvantage).*
The prevailing religion of the household seemed, in fact, to be
Americanism. The Newmans set about creating a tidy little family and
situating it in increasingly comfortable houses. In January 1924 Arthur
Jr. joined the family in the small, neat house on Renrock Road in
Cleveland Heights. On January 26 of the following year, in snow and
ice so daunting that Art and Theresa dared not venture out, Paul
Leonard joined the family. Within two years he was tumbling and
stumbling on the floors of the Newmans’ dream house in Shaker
Heights—the only childhood home he would ever remember.
* The Newman boys received no formal religious instruction after grade school, and
later on Paul would come more or less to see himself as an areligious Jew. He was so
out of touch with the faith, though, that he was once caught by a journalist declaring
frustration at not being able to reach anybody in the movie business on the phone—
only to learn to his surprise that it was, in fact, Yom Kippur.
Levy_9780307353757_5p_bm3_r1.z.qxp 3/20/09 2:04 PM Page 470
Acknowledgments
I never spoke with Paul Newman.

I wanted to; I tried.
I first got the idea to write this biography in late 2005 and was
given a green light from Harmony Books the following spring. Not
long after that I contacted Warren Cowan, who was still represent-
ing the Newmans in a public-relations capacity from his Los Angeles
office. I introduced myself, told him what my project was about, and
forwarded him a copy of the book proposal that I’d written for Har-
mony, describing my attitude toward Newman and his life. Warren
thanked me for contacting him and being open about my project,
and he informed me that he was “99 percent certain” that the New-
mans would not be interested in participating. In fact, he asked his
assistant to read the following statement to me, a bit of boilerplate
the Newmans had prepared to deal with requests of the sort I was
making:
On January 26, 1995, which was my 70th birthday, Joanne and

I resolved not to accept any more honors. Not, you understand,
out of arrogance, just a mellow belief that we had been honored
in gracious sufficiency and that more would constitute excess. As
the daughter says in Thornton Wilder’s Our Town, “Momma, am
I pretty?” Momma replies, “You’re pretty enough for all normal
purposes.” Joanne and I have been fortunate to be honored
enough for all normal purposes.
Acknowledgments 471
As a matter of course, I called Cowan again about three weeks later

and was told the Newmans were, in fact, not interested in assisting my
book project. And then, just to be sure, I called back one last time, in
about July 2007; once again I was told the door to Newman was closed.
And then I began to hear that he was ill, and I determined to respect his
privacy.
By that time I had done a lot of research: talking to colleagues, ac-
quaintances, collaborators; sorting through previously published biog-
raphies of Newman and people he had known or worked with; reading
histories of his hometown, his colleges, the Actors Studio, the Holly-
wood system; gathering and absorbing literally thousands of articles,
interviews, archived papers, transcripts, letters, memos, and legal docu-
ments; watching films and TV shows and listening to audio recordings.
I traveled to New York and Los Angeles and Cleveland and Gambier,
Ohio, and added even more material about his days and deeds to my
file cabinets, of which three full drawers were eventually filled with
Newmaniana.
I kept up the hope that I would someday be able to speak with the
man himself—if only to nail down some wobbly details that continu-
ally beguiled me. But I always suspected I’d never have the chance. So
I did the next best thing: I assembled a massive interview with Newman
out of the things he had told other interviewers. Starting with his fam-
ily origins, continuing through his childhood and schooling, tracing
his acting career from the start to the end, and touching on his mar-
riages, his children, his homes, his habits, his racing career, his busi-
nesses, his politics, his philanthropy, and his health: his life, in his
words, in chronological order, with the added benefit that he was often
talking about things quite soon after experiencing or doing them. It
was, in effect, the sort of soup-to-nuts interview that an authorized bi-
ographer might have gotten out of him: nearly forty thousand words’
worth. True, I was relying on the work of previous writers—and on
their accuracy, their ears, their instincts, and their interests—but bar-
ring access to the man himself, it seemed the next best thing.
Throughout the writing of this book, I used that massive collection
of Newman’s raw words as a road map and a tuning fork. I came to hear
in those words his voice, as it were, quite vividly: repetitions, variations,
472 Acknowledgments
inflections, confessions, lapses, elisions, evasions, favorite words, fa-

vorite stories. I developed a sense for when he was being open and
when he was just doing the work of being interviewed. It wasn’t the
same as actually asking him questions, but it gave me a real feel for him.
I also spoke with about fifty people who knew Newman, if only
briefly. Of course, without the blessing of the Newmans, there were
many folks who weren’t willing to talk to even the most respectful and
best-intentioned author. For example, through mutual acquaintances I
was granted an introduction to Stewart Stern, Newman’s best man at
his wedding to Joanne and a lifelong friend. He promptly and gra-
ciously told me that he wouldn’t dream of participating in a project
that his old friend hadn’t authorized; but he pointed me toward some
valuable resources, and I thank him for that.
Other friends and associates of Newman’s were willing to talk to me
only if they weren’t cited or acknowledged, and I hereby thank them by
respecting their wishes for anonymity. Among the interviewees and
sources whom I’m free to name, I am obliged to Bob Ames, Nancy
Bacon, Peggy Behrens, Pete Belov, Robert Benton, John Cohan, Brad
Coley, John Considine, Jonathan Demme, Bill Demora, Todd Field,
Barbara Fyfe, Jack Garfein, Joel Grey, Todd Haynes, Sally Kirkland,
Hugh Leslie, Ted Mahar, John Malkovich, Peter McAlevey, Karin
McPhail, Don Mitchell, Don Peasley, Arthur Penn, Richard Russo,
Ron Shelton, Bill Tammeus, and Ted Walch.
Two folks I spoke with were especially helpful in supplying me with
information and images: Sue Bronson and Kurt Wanieck. I was given
valuable materials (or told how to get them) by Rosemary Acena,
Roger Friedman, and Jon Ward. And I was led to specific interview
sources by Laura Bobovski, Charlie Haddad, Gabriel Mendoza, Marc
Mohan, Russ Smith, Janet Wainwright, and Mark Wigginton.
I’m especially grateful to Clint O’Connor of the Cleveland Plain
Dealer for help in researching Newman’s early years—and particularly
for connecting me to childhood acquaintances of Newman’s who still
call northeastern Ohio their home. I’d also like to thank a few friends
who passed along ideas, materials, tips on sources, or generally helpful
vibes, including Doug Holm, Ray Pride, David Row, Mike Russell,
Tom Sutpen, Willy Vlautin, and Jeffrey Wells.
Acknowledgments 473
I worked on this book using a number of archives and libraries, in-

cluding the Multnomah County Library (especially its interlibrary loan
service and the quiet rooms at its Hillsdale branch), the Margaret Her-
rick Library of the Motion Picture Academy of Arts and Sciences, the
UCLA Film and Television Archive, the Humanities and Social Sci-
ences Library of the New York Public Library, the Billy Rose Theater
Division of the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, the
Oral History Research Office of Columbia University, the Cleveland
Public Library, the Special Collections Department of the Cleveland
State University Library, the Reference Department of the Western
Reserve Historical Society, and the Special Collections and Archives
Department of Kenyon College’s Library and Information Services. I
used any number of online archives, including Ancestry.com, the Ency-
clopedia of Cleveland History, Genealogy.com, Google News, the
Internet Movie Database, LexisNexis, Rootsweb, and Wikipedia.
In Portland I was able to use three resources of the sort that make
it the best city I can imagine in which to be a working writer: Powell’s
Books, which is bigger than a lot of libraries—and has better hours;
Movie Madness, which had virtually every film Newman made on its
shelves, along with some real rarities; and ActivSpace, where I was able
to work cozily away in just about the perfect writer’s garret.
Also in Portland I got access to some resources through my work at
the Oregonian, and I have a great many people to thank there. The man-
agement of the newspaper were generous in allowing me to arrange my
schedule to work on the book; I thank Fred Stickel, Sandra Rowe, Peter
Bahtia, and Tom Whitehouse for their support. My editors were, as
ever, exemplary: I thank Shawn Vitt, Grant Butler, and Jolene Krawczak
for their unflagging patience and collegiality. And I haven’t anything
near the means to thank Barry Johnson for his peerless editorship, his
long-lasting friendship, and especially his careful reading of the first
third of the manuscript of this book—and his subsequent assurance that
I would not be out of my mind to continue writing it.
As good a friend is Richard Pine, an exemplary sounding board,
headshrinker, and businessman—just the qualities you want in an
agent; thanks, too, to his colleagues at Inkwell Management.
I didn’t know John Glusman when he commissioned the book from
474 Acknowledgments
me, and he was patient, keen-eyed, and sure as an editor; I’m lucky to
have gotten to work with him. Thanks as well to Anne Berry, Kate
Kennedy, and the many other people at Harmony whom I’ve gotten to
know only in the final weeks of my work, especially copy editor Janet
Biehl, a great eye. I feel in very good hands.
My chief thanks go to my family. The kids—Vince, Anthony, and
Paula—have always been cheerful and inspiring despite the mania that
settles on their dad when he gets to work. And their mother, Mary
Bartholemy, has demonstrated the most remarkable strength, loyalty,
insight, patience, and care. I can’t begin to compensate her for all she’s
done for me, taught me, and shared with me. All I can say is that with-
out her I couldn’t have created a page of this.
To purchase a copy of
Paul Newman: A Life
visit one of these online retailers:

Amazon
Barnes & Noble
Borders
IndieBound
Powell’s Books
Random House

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Design by Lauren Dong

merica doesn’t have a national epic, but Our Town might

A do in a pinch. The cracker-barrel homilies; the good-natured

occasionally be reminded of just where that place is. He’s a handsome

loved to sprinkle unexpected stardust in the humblest of contexts, just

could ordinary men struggling with quotidian issues—particularly the

Newman was proud of his profession, eternally grateful to his teach-

levels of accomplishment: four national amateur titles, two profes-

It’s a staggering list of achievements—the acting, the racing, the earn-

haker Heights was a dream within a dream, part Gar-

S den of Eden, part Camelot, part World of Tomorrow.

by doctrine, celibate, increasing their numbers only through adoption

Cleveland was a city of three genetic threads: the New England

named for a man called Moses Cleaveland. By 1850, though, there

* And he produced an accomplished son in William S. Newman, a classical pianist and

trustee of the Cleveland Play House, published four books of poetry,

army surplus bombsight parts and gyroscopes and did a rampaging

If the marriage of Arthur and Theresa Newman is clouded in a mist

a more imprecisely chronicled background than did her husband. She

Christian Science—the modern American spiritualist belief popular

I never spoke with Paul Newman.

On January 26, 1995, which was my 70th birthday, Joanne and

As a matter of course, I called Cowan again about three weeks later

inﬂections, confessions, lapses, elisions, evasions, favorite words, fa-

I worked on this book using a number of archives and libraries, in-

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